The Blue River

The river landscapes Renoir produced in the late 1880s and early 1890s reflect both his continuing engagement with the outdoor subjects that had defined Impressionism and his increasing focus on the southern regions where he traveled for health and warmth. The Blue River at the National Gallery of Art, dated to around 1890, belongs to the river-and-landscape type he explored throughout his career but treated with the warmer, more saturated palette of his late-Impressionist manner. The blue-green of a French river in summer — whether the Seine, the Gardon in southern France, or one of the Normandy streams — provided complementary contrast to his predominant warm flesh-tone register, and these landscape canvases function as chromatic counterweights to the nudes and flower paintings that dominated his late production. The National Gallery of Art holds a substantial group of Renoir's landscapes from different periods, allowing the evolution of his landscape handling to be traced from the pure Impressionist spontaneity of the 1870s through the more structured approach of his dry-period years to the warmer, more enveloping late manner of the 1890s and beyond.

River water is rendered in Renoir's characteristic broken-colour technique — blue, green, and violet touches creating the sense of a moving reflective surface rather than a flat blue wash. Tree reflections dissolve in the current. The sky is kept pale, its coolness contrasting with the richer colour intensity of the water and vegetation.